BACK WHEN DA STILL TAUGHT SCHOOL, she’d stalked her classroom in shoes adorned with buckles and buttons and rhinestone bows. Da didn’t just have smarts-she had style, which made it especially disturbing to watch her clomp down her front hall now in shoes heavy and ugly as miniature coffins.
Stumps. That’s what was inside those special shoes. This past winter, Da’s sugar had acted up again, and she’d gone into the hospital, missing her daughter’s wedding at the last minute. Not only that. When she came out, she left behind four toes.
Clump da clump da clump. Da’s shoes and cane beat a slow rhythm. Mo swallowed hard. Not that she was the squeamish sort. How could she be, living with Dottie, who regularly ate boogers and scabs? The sight of a run-over squirrel? The stink of Baby Baggott’s poopy Pampers? Business as usual.
But something about a three-toed foot made her knees wobble. Mo liked things whole. She refused to begin a jigsaw puzzle unless she knew all the pieces were there. A puzzle was nothing compared to your own body.
Da had the table set with her good dishes, yet something wasn’t quite right. Normally this house was all about neat corners and polished surfaces, but today it had a dull, unwashed look. Mercedes ran a finger through the dust furring the windowsill and frowned.
But the food! Da’s cooking was like an excellent mystery story, with spicy clues and sweet clues and then a great whammy of an ending when it all came together. Mo had just put her napkin in her lap-Da was a stickler for manners and posture-and picked up her fork when the glasses began to shiver and the dishes to tremble. A redheaded torpedo fired into the room, scoring a direct hit on Mercedes.
“You’re here!” The Wild Child squashed her face in the vicinity of Mercedes’s belly button. “I thought you’d never get here!”
Mercedes managed to peel Mo’s little sister off her, all except for a sour-apple lollipop, which hung suspended from her black tank top. Dottie retrieved it and graciously offered it to Da.
“Oh, wait, you can’t eat candy. You’re diabolic.”
“Diabetic!” corrected Mo.
Wrinkling her nose, Mercedes peered down at Dottie’s knotty red mane. “Eeyoo! What’s that? A fly that got caught and buzzed itself to death?” Mercedes did not exactly return Dottie’s affection. In fact, Mercedes preferred not to associate with anyone under four feet tall.
Dottie scrambled up into a chair and lovingly spread Mercedes’s napkin across her own lap. She wore an enormous T-shirt advertising hot sauce and, given how much she hated underwear, probably nothing else.
“Your head’s like a bowling ball,” she said pleasantly. “Dude, it’s hot in here. It’s hotter than h-”
“Lord give me strength!” Da’s face was arguing with itself, her mouth frowning while her eyes danced. “When was the last time those hands met soap and water? No one sits at my table with hands like that!”
She hauled Dottie into the kitchen. Mercedes and Mo took the opportunity to clean their plates and slip out the front door.
The heart-shaped leaves of a big ancient lilac drenched Da’s front porch in shade. If you sat here for a while, Da would pop out with lemonade, or a Band-Aid for the splinter you always got from a floorboard. Those rough, gaping floorboards had a ferocious appetite-over the years Mo had played here, they’d swallowed down more Barbie shoes and game pieces than she could count.
Her mother used to sit here with Da, listening to ball games on the radio. Mo could remember that. Mr. Wren watched on TV, but Da and Mrs. Wren claimed the more you had to imagine, the more exciting a thing was.
“Mo?”
“Yeah?”
“I just had a funny thought. You know all the toys we lost down the porch? Not to mention all the candy wrappers and Popsicle sticks we pushed through the cracks.” Mercedes sounded wistful, which was disturbing, since she was not the wistful type. “Imagine someday an archaeologist excavates down there. What would he or she think?’
“That it was the royal burial ground of an ancient civilization where Uno cards were sacred.”
“Where they worshipped tiny plastic shoes.” Mercedes laughed, and Mo forgot to be disturbed.
“Not to mention peach pits and repulsive Band-Aids.”
Oh, it was good to have Mercedes back!
“Come on,” said Mo. “I’ve got the Den all stocked, and we seriously need to catch up.”